For me, the latter was far more interesting. I got myself an internship at a large tech company between my junior and senior year of college. Let’s just say it went extremely well. Was offered a job six weeks in. The team dynamic is amazing, basically everyone in the group are friends and hang out outside work as well. Their offer was also fantastic, so it wasn’t a hard choice.
I’m still working there today on their hardware and systems engineering team. We design all of the systems for our products’ backbone, some of which contain custom hardware. I can find myself working on research efforts for future products, contributing to open source projects which we benefit from, working on Linux drivers for custom hardware, working on storage systems, or working on any random application which runs our backbone. It’s never boring.